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Lenovo has launched a brand-new addition to its ThinkPad mobile workstation portfolio—the ThinkPad P1. Lenovo’s thinnest, lightest, and sleekest mobile workstation, the ThinkPad P1 gives users the style they want and the performance they need.

No company better combines high performance with beauty better than luxury sports car manufacturer, Aston Martin. For them, the ThinkPad P1 represents not only an opportunity to increase productivity, but to also work with a high quality and performing product within a fast-paced environment.

“At Aston Martin, we are committed to a high standard of excellence with a drive to push to the next level,” said Neil Jarvis, director of IT and Innovation at Aston Martin. “We see the expression of similar values in the creation of the new ThinkPad P1. Whether it’s our creative team benefiting from the professional graphics and stunning display, or our executive team looking for an ultra-thin and light system with a touch of style, the ThinkPad P1 is the right fit for a variety of users across our company.”

The ThinkPad P1 provides users with a premium experience—both in look and feel and superior construction and components. With a signature black finish, glass touchpad, and seamless keyboard, the ThinkPad P1 has the high-end design to deliver the ultimate out-of-box experience.

This attention to detail goes even further with the ThinkPad P1 power supply. Customers know a bulky power supply runs counter to a thin and light workstation. To address this, Lenovo reduced the weight by 35 percent to ensure the ThinkPad P1 meets every requirement in the thin and light category.

Here are some other features of this mobile workstation:

Certified for key ISV applications, featuring 8th Gen Intel Xeon and Core processors, including support for the Core i9 CPU, ECC memory support, and speeds up to 4.6 GHz.

Boosted performance with the latest NVIDIA Quadro P1000 and P2000 professional graphics cards.

A 15-inch, 4K UHD display, representing 100 percent of the Adobe color gamut, as well as a touchscreen and IR camera standard.

4 TB of M.2 PCIe premier storage and 64 GB of memory at 2667 MHz.

With more than 25 years of experience developing top commercial laptops, ThinkPad P1 design engineers chose the best features from the ThinkPad portfolio to maximize power, performance, and premium design from top to bottom.

“When we set out to create the ThinkPad P1, we knew our challenge was to build a mobile workstation that would carry the legacy of professional power and reliability of our ThinkPad portfolio, but also meet our customer’s need for a thin, light, and sleek design,” says Rob Herman, general manager of Workstations at Lenovo. “Whether you are looking for power, the lightest mobile workstation around, or sleek and slim tech-envy, the ThinkPad P1 delivers on all counts, period.”

Lenovo is also introducing its new ThinkPad P72. Purpose-built for users looking for top-of-the-line power and performance, it is the ideal choice for users in the oil and gas, automotive, and financial industries. A true desktop replacement, its 17-inch chassis includes the latest 8th Gen Intel Xeon and Core processors, and the most powerful NVIDIA Quadro graphics—up to P5200—to tackle the most demanding workflows with ease. With up to 6 TB of storage, 128 GB of memory, and 16 GB of Intel Optane memory, users have vast amounts of compute power to handle immense data sets.

Lenovo is committed to understanding its customers’ evolving needs and daily demands of their workflows and workloads. With the introduction of the ThinkPad P1 and the ThinkPad P72, Lenovo is addressing two very distinct and unique groups of customer needs.

Both will be available at the end of August 2018. The ThinkPad P1 starts at $1,949 and the ThinkPad P72 starts at $1,799. Learn more about the ThinkPad P1 and the ThinkPad P72.

Today’s post was written by Joseph (Jody) Hobbs,managing directorof business applications and information security officer at Centra.

Centra is proud to count itself among the early adopters of cloud technology in the healthcare field. Back in 2014, we saw cloud computing as a way to keep up with the rapid growth we were experiencing across the enterprise—and the challenge of adapting to industry changes under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Five years later, we’re still using Microsoft Cloud services to remain on the leading edge of business productivity software so that we can provide exceptional patient care.

With Microsoft 365, we are better able to adapt to industry-wide changes introduced by ACA, such as the transition from a fee-for-service model to a quality-based model. This change made capturing data and analytics very important, because now reimbursement is based on quality of care, not quantity of services. We use Power BI, the data analytics tool from Microsoft Office 365 E5, to meet new healthcare reporting requirements and provide a wealth of data to our clinicians. They use this data to measure their performance against quality benchmarks to improve patient experiences and health outcomes.

We also turned to Microsoft 365 to help address Centra data security and privacy policies. Microsoft accommodated our requirement for data to remain in the continental United States, which helps us comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations that are standard in the healthcare industry. We also found a great solution for emailing sensitive information by combining a Microsoft two-factor authentication solution with our existing encryption appliance. Microsoft invests an incredible amount in its security posture, more than we ever could, and this, along with the knowledge that our data is not intermingled with others’ data in the tenant, gives us peace of mind. And we use Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, which gives us great insight into malicious activities aimed at our employees’ inboxes.

Keeping our Firstline Workers flexible and mobile is another major priority. We plan to get all our clinical workers online with Office 365 to actualize our vision for a more productive, mobile workforce. We have almost 4,000 employees taking advantage of Office 365 ProPlus and downloading up to five instances of Office 365 on a range of devices. This makes it seamless for them to work from home or the office using the same powerful, cloud-based productivity apps.

As Centra continues to grow from a network of hospitals to an assortment of health-related enterprises, adding everything from a college of nursing to our own insurance business, we see a cloud-based workplace solution as key to staying agile and making the most of our momentum. In Microsoft 365, we have found a solution that marries the strict security requirements of our industry with the needs of a workforce that demands anytime, anywhere access to colleagues and information. For Centra, change isn’t just a matter of increasing productivity or mobility—at the end of the day, our ability to stay up to date with the latest technology innovations means we are providing the best care possible.

Read the case study to learn more about how Centra uses Microsoft 365 to improve quality-based healthcare practices and establish mobile, highly secure work environments to expedite patient care.

Today’s post was written by Tony Qualls, director of enterprise technical services at Adventist Health System in Altamonte Springs, Florida.

Over the years, healthcare has changed from hospital-based care to preventive and continuous care that happens throughout an individual’s life—outside of hospital walls and inside patient homes and neighborhood clinics. Consequently, Adventist Health System is in the midst of a big transformation to a more consumer-centric organization to meet the needs of patients and families at every stage of health.

Our more than 80,000 employees are embracing this new care delivery model, and as many of them are frequently on the go, they need secure, quick access to information from anywhere.

With Microsoft 365, we’re able to give them access to the information they need in a secure, compliant environment. We’ve been a longtime user of Microsoft Office 365 to deliver the latest productivity innovations to our clinical and non-clinical employees. We migrated to Microsoft 365 to gain more flexibility with our licensing for Office 365 and for the Windows 10 operating system and Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS).

We have 28,000 Microsoft 365 E3 licenses for our office staff and 41,000 Office 365 F1 licenses for our Firstline team members—nurses, doctors, and other employees. These individuals carry laptops and tablets with them throughout the day or access shared devices using badge-tapping technology. With Microsoft 365, we can cost-effectively license the specific applications that employees need to accomplish various tasks throughout their workdays.

For example, our clinical staff uses Skype for Business Online to improve patient flow and connect physicians with remote patients. Now, we’re taking it to the next level with Microsoft Teams—probably the fastest-growing Office 365 application we have deployed. Everything’s in one place—SharePoint Online sites, files, chat, meetings, and Microsoft Planner. It’s so easy to use, and we find that after people get invited to one Teams channel, they turn around and create channels of their own to support other projects. With Teams, we have persistent conversations, documents, and other resources about a topic in one place, which helps groups focus and move faster. In addition, it’s a highly secure environment that we trust, and we can remain completely compliant with HIPAA and other healthcare regulations.

At Adventist Health System, we strive for excellence in all that we do. Our IT employees strive to be recognized as an industry leader. Utilizing Teams is just one way we are supporting our organization’s vision to be wholistic, exceptional, connected, affordable, and viable.

Communication is crucial to the success of any organization, and Adventist Health System is no different. The quicker we can share information, updates, and plans, the faster we gain buy-in from our team members. The clinical workspace thrives on rapid communication and collaboration around patient care. This, in turn, helps foster better outcomes and patient satisfaction.

It’s exciting to see the Teams roadmap incorporating artificial intelligence capabilities by offering speech-to-text and meeting transcription services. As we gather takeaways and valuable information from meetings, I am happy that Teams allows me to focus on listening to my staff and peers while it captures and transcribes meeting notes for later review.

There’s an abundance of innovation coming from Microsoft, and we’ve taken the approach of releasing new Office 365 applications directly to employees and letting user communities provide guidance, tips, and support on Yammer channels. This has been a great adoption model that has empowered employees to put these tools to work in ways that make sense for them.

Because Microsoft matches productivity innovation with security innovation, we can confidently utilize new technologies on tens of thousands of mobile devices. We’ve standardized on Windows 10 Enterprise, chiefly for security features such as default encryption. But EMS also includes a great bundle of security tools and licensing options that have significantly decreased our licensing costs while giving us enhanced security capabilities.

From a support perspective, Microsoft Intune and mobile email with Exchange Online have been tremendous timesavers. Employees had to unenroll and re-enroll devices in a previous email security program, and our infrastructure support team was inundated with support tickets around the need to resync mobile email accounts. But with Intune, employees download the Microsoft Outlook mobile app, we apply the correct policies, and they’re off and running.

With Microsoft 365, our clinical, support, and IT staffs are all better equipped to help Adventist Health System transform its business in a secure, compliant manner to meet the needs of today’s changing healthcare landscape.

Earlier this month, we announced new intelligent event capabilities in Microsoft 365 that enable anyone to create live and on-demand events for teams and across the organization. Today, we invite you to use the public preview of live events in Microsoft 365 and discover new ways to foster connection and engagement between leaders and employees at every level in your organization.

More than ever before, employees in the modern workplace seek work environments that unlock creativity, make their lives more productive and fulfilling, and foster a sense of connection with their organization’s mission and purpose.

A critical first step for your organization to thrive in this new culture of work is to drive alignment of your people around shared purpose and goals. Leaders realize that organizations who do this well have an advantage in attracting and retaining an engaged workforce.

Here are four ways your organization can enable leaders and employees to connect with new live events in Microsoft 365:

1—Use live events to kickstart interactive discussions across your organization

Today, executives at Microsoft—including CEO Satya Nadella—use Microsoft 365 to connect and communicate with employees around the globe. Now, any company or organization with Microsoft 365 can create these moments of high engagement, where people are focused on leaders and their messages and ask questions to clarify or reinforce conversations in the community.

Using Microsoft Stream, Teams, or Yammer, you can create a live event wherever your audience, team, or community resides. Attendees receive notifications and can participate in real-time, with high-definition video and interactive discussion using web, mobile, or desktop.

Following an event, it’s easy to make the recording available on an event page, allowing you to watch the event on your own schedule and catch up quickly with powerful AI features that unlock the content of the event recording. The recording is automatically transcribed and detects changes in speakers—making it simple to search for content later.

For employees who are in different time zones or unable to attend live, the conversation keeps going, so they still feel connected to leaders and peers—helping to overcome geographical or organizational boundaries.

The event and recordings are powered by Microsoft Stream, the intelligent video service in Office 365.

2—Foster sustained dialogue in open communities

Give everyone a voice—before, during, and after a live event in Microsoft 365—with Yammer communities that span functions or the entire organization. Providing a forum for employees to be heard is an important piece of transforming a culture. These communities are where people can come any time to raise ideas, concerns, or questions, and where leaders can reply in an authentic way.

An active Yammer community builds trust and a sense of connection and belonging. And it provides a forum where employees who might not feel comfortable speaking out during a live event can connect directly with leaders.

With inline message translation, live events in Microsoft 365 empowers people to express themselves in their own language.

3—Create an intranet site for leaders to share events, blogs, video, news, and resources

Communicate at scale as a leader with a continuous, online presence using content, conversation, and video channels within a SharePoint communications site. You can optimize for news distribution and blogs, and deepen engagement with related content, polls and surveys, and readership analytics.

This is also a great spot to share recorded events for later viewing. Simply create a dedicated page for each event where employees can submit questions and comments in advance. Leaders and organizers can then use this input to craft the messaging and content of the events.

4—Plan corporate communications and measure impact

Executive and internal communications may be managed by a team of one or a team of many—but it takes careful planning and execution to ensure success. Microsoft Teams—the hub for teamwork in Office 365—is ideally suited to work together in the creation and production of events and other executive communications. It provides an effective backstage for your live event, giving you a shared space to work with speakers and approve content before sharing with a broader audience.

Once you have begun engaging your audience, every message within a Yammer community has a visible count of how many people your post has reached. This helps both community organizers and employees understand what is being read. Group insights demonstrate how the knowledge and information created in the community benefit people—regardless of their membership status in the group. For example, passive visitors may gain value from group conversations and apply the information elsewhere in their daily work. You can also see the number of views for an event recording and across a channel, and how many people liked the video. Pages and news articles also have statistics to understand readership.

Empowering all leaders across an organization

Leadership, of course, does not just refer to organizational leaders. Leaders of communities may be subject matter experts, functional managers, or passionate individuals who are leading areas of expertise, practices, or interest groups. These same capabilities in Microsoft 365 can enable leaders at any level to create and sustain connection with their communities.

Patrick Yates, manager of Diversity and Inclusion at TDS Telecom, considers community connections and engagement an important part of the employee experience, and a boon to recruiting talent. “Younger generations entering the workforce especially want a modern, inclusive environment—to be part of something that’s larger than themselves.”

Connect your employees and leaders today

Experience the public preview of live events in Microsoft 365, and get started on connecting your leaders and employees today. We will be adding additional features and functionality based on your feedback in the Tech Community.

To create a live event, you will need an Office 365 E3 or E5 license and your admin must give you permission to do so. To attend a live event, you need an Office 365 license for authenticated users. Public (anonymous) access is possible in specific configurations.

This month, we hosted 17,000 attendees at Microsoft Inspire, our annual partner conference, and announced a set of new capabilities in Microsoft 365 that enhance teamwork—including a free version of Microsoft Teams. We also rolled out a number of new features across Microsoft 365 to help organizations empower their employees—including updates that streamline the management of common tasks and improve data visualization. We also want to hear your feedback, so that we can make sure these updates are relevant and useful to you.

Here’s a look at what’s new in July.

Microsoft Planner capabilities in SharePoint team sites—We integrated Planner with SharePoint to bring new task management capabilities directly into team sites. You can now add a plan directly to your team site from within SharePoint and embed Planner boards and chart views from those plans within SharePoint pages and news posts. This integration enables team members to easily access and interact with project tasks, while keeping important resources in a single repository.

Add plan information directly on pages and news posts with the new Planner web part.

Threaded comments in Microsoft Excel—We introduced threaded comments to Excel, improving collaboration on shared documents and providing a consistent experience across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Threaded comments enable you to easily follow conversations taking place around content in a document and directly interact with coworkers using @mentions and nested replies. These improvements make it easier to work on spreadsheets with multiple collaborators and enhance readability and editing across devices.

Threaded comments make it easier to work with multiple team members in Excel.

Visio Visual for Microsoft Power BI—Power BI subscribers can now use powerful Visio visualization capabilities, right in Power BI. With Visio Visual, you can create interactive Power BI dashboards using Power BI data sets and Visio visualization tools to quickly illustrate and compare data with charts and diagrams.

Visio Visual provides new and exciting ways to explore data in Power BI.

Microsoft 365 usage analytics in Power BI—We announced the general availability of Microsoft 365 usage analytics in Power BI. Now, Microsoft 365 usage data can be connected directly to Power BI to help you better understand the services you own. We also introduced a new Teams usage report, which provides an overview of how your organization works together in Microsoft Teams, with details on various functions like chat, channels, and meetings. By using Microsoft 365 usage analytics, admins can drive improved adoption of services throughout their business and better leverage IT spend.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator in the Microsoft 365 people card—We’re enhancing the Microsoft 365 people card to include information from LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This update allows you to surface profile information for your prospects and customers everywhere their people card appears in Office 365—helping you to build better relationships.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator in the Microsoft 365 people card allows you to build better relationships.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator in the Microsoft 365 people card is rolling out soon to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 commercial customers in Outlook for the web.

Today’s post was written by Bert Floyd, senior IT manager of assistive technologies at TD Bank Group.

My journey with accessible technology at TD started more than 10 years ago, when I was called in to help incorporate a screen reader and Braille display into our retail environment for a new employee who was blind. Back then, it was a steep learning curve for the IT department. That’s not the case today. Over the intervening decade, we have created an inclusive corporate culture that celebrates everyone, including people with disabilities, and provides us with huge business potential. For example, one in seven people* in Canada identifies as having a disability, and there is an increasing incidence of age-related disabilities among our growing elderly demographic. Making sure our services are easily accessible is key to earning the business of this considerable segment of the population.

We are excited about introducing accessible technologies within Microsoft Office 365 and Windows 10 to empower our employees to help us work toward this strategic advantage. We find that most people can benefit from these accessible technologies, whether they identify as having a disability or not, because the technologies are built in to the Office apps. When employees can customize their environment and adapt to a wide variety of situations, they will be far more successful and productive.

And when we accommodate employees who identify as having a disability, we gain their insight and innovation to help us build accessibility right into our products and services. People with disabilities must think creatively about how to do things that other people don’t necessarily have to worry about, and we want to support that creativity in our workplace. We’re deploying Office 365 to all our employees and Windows 10 to almost 100,000 computers, which helps create an accessible workplace and ensure we will not miss out on hiring the best and the brightest.

From our websites to our brick-and-mortar branches and ATMs, we try to consider accessibility in every aspect of the customer experience. And we believe that with a more diverse and inclusive workforce, we’ll be in a better position to get there.

I’m excited about giving our employees the opportunity to leverage the accessibility features in Office 365 and Windows 10 in their everyday work lives. All employees need to think about accessibility, and everyone plays a role in creating a supportive, inclusive culture. When we all use the same inclusive tool set, there is enormous potential for improving productivity and driving awareness about the value of creating accessible documents and presentations for everyone to easily read and understand. Employees at TD already have access to Accessibility Checker, which makes it easy to spot problems and make content in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote more accessible. People are learning about Narrator and Magnifier in Windows 10 and about the built-in color filters.

We have come a long way since hiring that first employee who was blind. Today, approximately 6 percent of our workforce identifies as having a disability. Our Assistive Technologies Lab welcomes anyone to come and learn about inclusive design and the technologies we have available to support our employees. We work with technology projects to help them conform to our IT accessibility standards, and we rolled out a training program for our developers and testers—a number of them with disabilities—to ensure we fully consider accessibility in our customer-facing products and services.

Today, TD prides itself on its diverse and talented workforce, and I’m incredibly lucky to be part of a great team that works hard to put so many resources behind our employees. Along with our assistive technologies, we are using Office 365 and Windows 10 to help us remove barriers for people with disabilities to create a more inclusive workplace that’s as diverse and exciting as the communities we serve.

The nearly 40,000 employees of Eli Lilly and Company are on a mission to make medicines that help people live longer, healthier, and more active lives. But they know that developing new treatments for cancer, diabetes, and other debilitating diseases requires collaboration with the best minds working together to foster innovation.

That’s why Lilly takes a collaborative approach to discovering and developing new medicines—between lab researchers and the rest of the company—as well as with a global network of physicians, medical researchers, and healthcare organizations. Working together—creatively and efficiently—can help generate new ideas that fuel innovation. To bring together scientists across hundreds of locations and organizations and truly empower the workforce, Lilly selected Microsoft 365 Enterprise.

While Lilly is in the early stage of deployment, these cloud-based collaboration tools, including Microsoft Teams, are making an impact. Mike Meadows, vice president and chief technology officer at Lilly, says that the technology will allow for enhanced productivity and teamwork, while helping to protect IP:

“Collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams enhance our ability for researchers and other employees to work together in faster and more creative ways, advancing our promise to make life better through innovative medicines. Microsoft 365 helps us bring the best minds together while keeping data secure and addressing regulatory compliance requirements.”

Like enterprise customers across the globe, Lilly sees Microsoft 365 as a robust, intelligent productivity and collaboration solution that empowers employees to be creative and work together. And when deployment of Windows 10 is complete, employees across the company will advance a new culture of work where creative collaboration that sparks critical thinking and innovation happens anywhere, anytime.

At Microsoft, we’re humbled to play a role in helping Lilly make life better for people around the world.

Dell delivers compact solutions that pack a punch, including a 1U rack workstation and towers starting at $649.

Companies of all sizes and budgets looking for powerful, affordable, compact industry-leading workstations now have new choices for their needs from Dell, including the world’s most powerful 1U rack workstation.¹

The Dell Precision 3930 Rack delivers powerful performance in a compact industrial footprint. Its 1U rack height delivers better rack density and extended operating temperatures, while features such as its short depth, dust filters, and legacy ports allow it to integrate seamlessly into complex medical imaging and industrial automation solutions.

Other features include:

The rack workstation provides up to 64 GB of 2666MHz DDR4 memory thanks to the introduction of Intel Xeon E processors and an 8th Generation Intel Core CPU.

The rack workstation offers best-in-class workstation performance and provides the flexibility of up to 250W of doublewide GPUs, and scalability with up to 24 TB of storage.

With 3 PCIe slots, including an optional PCI slot, this workstation can tackle complex tasks with ease.

A range of NVIDIA Quadro professional GPUs are available. With the Quadro P6000, users benefit from 24GB of GDDR5X and powerful ultra-high-end graphics performance.

In addition, customers have the option to choose AMD Radeon Pro graphics.

If your company is looking for versatile, secure, and fast remote 1:1 user access, you can add optional Teradici PCOIP technology. The rack workstation effortlessly integrates into the datacenter, which helps reduce clutter at your desk.

A smaller footprint that doesn’t skimp on performance

Going small can lead to big things, so Dell has built these new entry-level workstations to fuel the future of innovation across engineering design, science, mathematics, and other data- and graphics-intensive fields. Running a highly powerful machine no longer requires having a large work space or a large budget, making this level of performance available to many companies and workers for the first time.

“Customers across Engineering & Manufacturing, Media & Entertainment, and beyond have come to rely on Dell workstations to deliver the highest performing systems for their critical workload. But as we enter the next era of workstations, the conversation is accelerating to immersive workflows utilizing even smaller footprints. Dell is leading the way in this evolution with these new entry-level workstations designed to deliver the ultimate in performance with a substantially smaller footprint,” says Rahul Tikoo, vice president and general manager of Dell Precision. “When access to leading technology improves, innovation flourishes. Sometimes something as simple as a smaller form factor can unleash new ideas and capabilities that have the power to reshape an industry.”

The Dell Precision 3630 Tower is 23 percent smaller² than the previous generation with more expandability, so workers can get the precise solution they need regardless of workspace constraints. It features a range of easy-to-reach ports that make it possible to connect to external data sources, storage devices, and more. It offers scalable storage featuring SATA and PCIe NVMe SSDs, which can be configured for up to 14 TB with RAID support.

As workstation users often create intellectual property, Dell will also offer an optional Smart Card (CAC/PIV) reader to make secure data management easier.

If you’re interested in creating or enjoying VR experiences and other resource-intensive tasks, this workstation is a good choice, thanks to an 8th Generation Intel Core i and new professional-grade Xeon E processors with faster memory speeds up to 2666MHz 64 GB. It also offers up to 225W of NVIDIA Quadro and AMD Radeon Pro graphics support.

The new Dell Precision 3430 Small Form Factor Tower is a great fit for many workstation users, offering many of the same benefits as the Precision 3630, but in an even smaller form factor and up to 55W of graphics support. It’s also expandable with up to 6TB of storage with RAID support.

Dell also introduced support for Intel Core X–series processors in addition to the Intel Xeon W processor options already available on the Dell Precision 5820 Tower. These new processor options bring the enhanced performance and reliability of a workstation at a more affordable price point for customers.

Adding Intel Optane memory keeps responsiveness high and high-capacity storage costs lower on all these new Dell Precision 3000 series workstations. Customers can expect the same build quality and reliability of the Dell Precision line.

It’s been one year since we introduced Microsoft 365, a holistic workplace solution that empowers everyone to work together in a secure way. In that time, Microsoft 365 seats have grown by more than 100 percent, building on the more than 135 million commercial monthly Office 365 users, 200 million Windows 10 commercial devices in use, and over 65 million seats of Enterprise Mobility + Security.

This momentum is driven by customers—in every industry—who are transforming their organizations to enable high performance from a workforce that is more diverse, distributed, and mobile than ever before. Microsoft 365 is designed to empower every type of worker—whether on the first lines of a business, managing a small team, or leading an entire organization.

Today, we are introducing four new ways Microsoft 365 connects people across their organization and improves collaboration habits, including extending the power of Microsoft Teams and new AI-infused capabilities in Microsoft 365.

1—Try Microsoft Teams, now available in a free version

To address the growing collaboration needs of our customers, last year we introduced Microsoft Teams, a powerful hub for teamwork that brings together chat, meetings, calling, files, and apps into a shared workspace in Microsoft 365. Now, more than 200,000 businesses across 181 markets use Teams to collaborate and get work done.

This new offering provides a powerful introduction to Microsoft 365. Teams in Microsoft 365 includes everything in the free version plus additional storage, enterprise security, and compliance, and it can be used for your whole organization, regardless of size.

As we advance our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, what’s most exciting are the stories of customers taking on big projects with a small workforce, such as The Hustle Media Company—who helps movers, shakers, and doers make their dent in the world. Their popular daily email provides their audience with the tech and business news they need to know.

“As a media company that nearly quadrupled in size over the last year, it became apparent we needed a solution to connect all of The Hustle’s offices. As previous Slack users, we found that Microsoft Teams has all the features that other chat-based apps bring, but the teamwork hub allows everything to live in one place.”—Adam Ryan, vice president of Media at The Hustle

Or, take it from Urban Agriculture Company, a small business specializing in organic, easy-to-use grow kits of vegetables, flowers, and herbs. After landing on Oprah’s favorite things, founder Chad Corzine turned to Microsoft 365 Business and Teams to manage communication among his rapidly growing departments, onboard employees, and protect customer data.

2—Use new intelligent event capabilities in Microsoft 365

Today, we’re also introducing new capabilities that allow anyone in your organization to create live and on-demand events in Microsoft 365. Events can be viewed in real-time or on-demand, with high-definition video and interactive discussion.

AI-powered services enhance the on-demand experience with:

A speaker timeline, which uses facial detection to identify who is talking, so you can easily jump to a particular speaker in the event.

Speech-to-text transcription, timecoding, and transcript search, so you can quickly find moments that matter in a recording.

Closed captions to make the event more accessible to all.

Events can be as simple or as sophisticated as you prefer. You can use webcams, content, and screen sharing for informal presentations, or stream a studio-quality production for more formal events.

3—Leverage analytics to build better collaboration habits

We’re rolling out the preview of a new Workplace Analytics solution, which uses collaboration insights from the Microsoft Graph, to help teams run efficient meetings, create time for focused work, and respect work/life boundaries. Organizations can use aggregate data in Workplace Analytics to identify opportunities for improving collaboration, then share insights and suggest habits to specific teams using MyAnalytics.

We’re also rolling out nudges, powered by MyAnalytics in Microsoft 365, which deliver habit-changing tips in Outlook, such as flagging that you’re emailing coworkers after hours or suggesting you book focused work time for yourself.

4—Work with others on a shared digital canvas with Microsoft Whiteboard

Microsoft Whiteboard is now generally available for Windows 10, coming soon to iOS, and preview on the web. Whether meeting in person or virtually, people need the ability to collaborate in real-time. The new Whiteboard application enables people to ideate, iterate, and work together both in person and remotely, across multiple devices. Using pen, touch, and keyboard, you can jot down notes, create tables and shapes, freeform drawings, and search and insert images from the web.

Get started

Whether you’re managing a new project or creating your own business, it helps to have your team behind you to brainstorm ideas, tackle the work together, and have some fun along the way. Take your teamwork to the next level and start using Teams today.

Collaboration habits can make or break teamwork. When people run efficient meetings, create time for focused work, and respect work/life boundaries their teams thrive. Putting these habits in place is difficult and takes the support of the entire team. Data can create a common language to help members build consensus on important teamwork norms. By shedding light on how work actually gets done, organizations can build more efficient, creative, and engaged teams.

Today, we are announcing two new features—Workplace Analytics solutions and MyAnalytics nudges—designed to put individuals and teams at the center of change.

Workplace Analytics solutions—empower teams to master their time

Today, we are introducing solutions to help turn organization-wide insights into action plans for individuals and teams. The first solution—Workplace Analytics solution for teamwork—helps teams build better collaboration habits and master their time by guiding organizations through three steps:

Discover collaboration challenges—Use data from everyday work in Office 365, like emails and meetings, to discover challenges like meeting overload, minimal time for focused work, or high after-hours workload. Combine these insights with engagement survey results to find connections between work patterns and indicators of team health like engagement and innovation scores.

Analysis shows that the marketing team spends far more time in meetings than other teams and could benefit from being enrolled in a change program to help reduce meeting hours.

Empower teams to change—Enroll teams in change programs to help them build better habits like bringing agendas to meetings and blocking time for daily focused work. Participants receive personal productivity insights and action plans powered by MyAnalytics.

When teams are enrolled in a change program, members get access to an action plan in MyAnalytics that shows progress towards meeting team goals.

Measure and improve—Make sure your change programs are successful by measuring progress against goals over time. Iterate and improve as you see which action plans succeed or fail in changing teamwork habits.

This team is four weeks into their change program and has already decreased average weekly meeting hours by 11 percent.

The Workplace Analytics solution for teamwork—accessed via the Solutions tab—is now available in preview for customers using both Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics. Learn more about the Workplace Analytics solution for teamwork.

Building better teams starts with transparent, data-driven dialog—but no one is perfect and sticking to good collaboration habits can be challenging in a fast-paced job. Nudges in MyAnalytics can help close the gap by providing friendly, data-driven collaboration tips that surface as you get work done in Office 365.

User sees a notification on a meeting invite that nudges them to set aside time for focused work.

Starting this summer, four types of MyAnalytics nudges will start to surface in Outlook as you read and compose emails and meeting invites.

Get more focus time—Challenging, innovative work requires deep focus and undivided attention. As your calendar fills up with meetings, MyAnalytics will remind you to set aside time for focused work before accepting new invites. You can see available times and block them off without leaving your inbox. MyAnalytics will also notify you when a meeting invite conflicts with a block of focus time that you’ve already scheduled.

Run more effective meetings—Meetings are necessary to get work done, but they often take up the entire week, leaving little time for other work. As you create and receive meeting invites, MyAnalytics will nudge you to put good meeting habits into practice and save precious hours. For example, MyAnalytics will nudge you to delegate coworkers to cover a meeting for you if your schedule is already busy.

Reduce your after-hours impact on coworkers—We announced last year that MyAnalytics summarizes your after-hours impact on coworkers. Now, MyAnalytics will actively nudge you to avoid sending after-hours emails as you draft them to coworkers that you’ve recently impacted outside of regular working hours.

Stay on top of to-do’s and unread email—MyAnalytics already uses AI to remind you of tasks you promised over email to complete for coworkers (and tasks they asked you to get done). Now, MyAnalytics surfaces these reminders as you read emails from coworkers, so you can close out important tasks before taking on new ones. MyAnalytics will also remind you of unread email for your important contacts.

Starting this summer, MyAnalytics users will see nudges on the latest version of Outlook on the web. Users can turn off nudging using the MyAnalytics add-in for Outlook. Read our support article to learn more.

MyAnalytics comes with Office 365 Enterprise E5 and is available as an add-on to other Office 365 enterprise plans. Learn more about MyAnalytics.

OneDrive (previously SkyDrive, Windows Live SkyDrive, and Windows Live Folders) is a file hosting service operated by Microsoft as part of its suite of Office Online services. It allows users to store files as well as other personal data like Windows settings or BitLocker recovery keys in the cloud. Files can be synced to a PC and accessed from a web browser or a mobile device, as well as shared publicly or with specific people.

OneDrive offers 5 GB of storage space free of charge;[2] additional storage can be added either separately or through subscriptions to other Microsoft services such as Office 365[2] (it was also possible with the now discontinued Groove Music[3]).

History

Windows Live Folders logo

Logo as "SkyDrive"

At its launch the service, known as Windows Live Folders at the time (with a codename of SkyDrive), was provided as a limited beta available to a few testers in the United States.[4] On August 1, 2007, the service was expanded to a wider audience. Shortly thereafter, on August 9, 2007, the service was renamed Windows Live SkyDrive and made available to testers in the United Kingdom and India.[5] As of 22 May 2008 SkyDrive was initially available in 38 countries and regions.,[6] later expanded to 62.[7] On December 2, 2008, the capacity of an individual SkyDrive account was upgraded from 5 GB to 25 GB, and Microsoft added a separate entry point called Windows Live Photos which allowed users to access their photos and videos stored on SkyDrive. This entry point allowed users to add "People tags" to their photos, download photos into Windows Photo Gallery or as a ZIP file, as well as viewing Exif metadata such as camera information for the photos uploaded. Microsoft also added the ability to have full-screen slide shows for photos using Silverlight.

SkyDrive was updated to "Wave 4" release on June 7, 2010, and added the ability to work with Office Web Apps (now known as Office Online), with versioning. In this update, due to the discontinuation of Windows Live Toolbar, the ability to synchronise and share bookmarked web links between users via SkyDrive was also discontinued. However, users were still able to use Windows Live Mesh, which replaced the previous Windows Live Favorites, to synchronize their favorites between computers until its discontinuation in February 2013.[8]

In June 2010, users of Office Live Workspace, released in October 2007,[9] were migrated to Windows Live Office. The migration included all existing workspaces, documents, and sharing permissions.[10] The merger of the two services was a result of Microsoft's decision to merge its Office Live team into Windows Live in January 2009,[11] as well as several deficiencies with Office Live Workspace, which lacked high-fidelity document viewing and did not allow files to be edited from within the web browser.[12] Office Live Workspace also did not offer offline collaboration and co-authoring functionality – instead documents were "checked out" and "checked in", though the service did integrate with SharedView for real-time screen sharing.

On June 20, 2011, Microsoft overhauled the user interface for SkyDrive, built using HTML5 technologies. The updated version featured caching, hardware acceleration, HTML5 video, quick views, cleaner arrangement of photos and infinite scrolling. Microsoft also doubled the file size limit from 50 MB to 100 MB per file. With this update, Microsoft consolidated the different entry points for SkyDrive, such as Windows Live Photos and Windows Live Office, into one single interface. Files and folders shared with a user, including those in Windows Live Groups, were also accessible in the new interface.[13] On November 29, 2011, Microsoft updated SkyDrive to make sharing and file management easier, as well as HTML5 and other updates. This update also allowed users to see how much storage they had (and how much they had used), a feature that had been removed in the previous update as part of the redesign.[14]

On December 3, 2011, Microsoft released SkyDrive apps for iOS and Windows Phone, which are available in the App Store and Windows Phone Store respectively. On April 22, 2012, Microsoft released a SkyDrive desktop app for Windows Vista, 7 and 8, as well as macOS, allowing users to synchronize files on SkyDrive, much like Windows Live Mesh, and to "fetch" files on their computer via the web browser. In addition, SkyDrive also provided additional storage available for purchase and reduced the free storage space for new users to 7 GB (from 25 GB). Existing users were offered a free upgrade offer to retain their 25 GB of free storage. The updated SkyDrive also allowed files up to 2 GB in size (uploaded via the SkyDrive desktop app).[15] The update also brought additional features such as Open Document Format (ODF) capability, URL shortening services and direct sharing of files to Twitter.

On August 14, 2012, Microsoft announced a new update for SkyDrive which brought changes and improvements to SkyDrive.com, SkyDrive for Windows desktop and OS X, and the SkyDrive API as part of Live Connect. For SkyDrive.com, the updates brought a new "modern" design for the web service consistent with Outlook.com, and along with the UI update the service also received improvements such as instant search, contextual toolbar, multi-select in thumbnail view, drag-and-drop files into folders, and sorting improvements. For the SkyDrive for Windows desktop and macOS applications, the update brought new performance improvements to photo uploads and the sync experience. The update also improved the SkyDrive API with the removal of file type restrictions, ability to upload images in their full resolution, as well as a new SkyDrive file picker for opening and saving files.[16] On August 28, 2012, Microsoft released a SkyDrive app for Android on Google Play store.[17] On September 18, 2012, Microsoft also introduced a recycle bin feature on SkyDrive and announced that SkyDrive will allow users to create online surveys via Excel Web App.[18]

BSkyB lawsuit and OneDrive renaming

Microsoft became involved in a lawsuit with British television broadcaster BSkyB for using the word "Sky", resulting in a High Court ruling in June 2013 that the service's brand breached BSkyB's trademark.[19] On July 31, 2013, in a joint press release between BSkyB and Microsoft, it was announced that a settlement had been reached and as a result the SkyDrive name would be dropped. BSkyB allowed Microsoft to continue using the brand "for a reasonable period of time to allow for an orderly transition to a new brand".[20] "SkyDrive" was renamed "OneDrive" on most platforms on February 19, 2014, following an announcement on January 27.[21][22][23]

On June 18, 2015, Microsoft launched an improved design of OneDrive for the web.[24]

In 2015 Microsoft removed the unlimited storage plan for Office 365 Home, Personal and University packages, reduced the free OneDrive storage from 15 GB to 5 GB, and replaced paid subscriptions to 100 GB and 200 GB plans to a $1.99 per month 50 GB plan. These changes caused major controversy with users, some of whom petitioned Microsoft to reverse the plans. By November 21, 2015, in response to Microsoft's November 2 announcement, over 70,000 people had taken to the official OneDrive uservoice to voice their concerns.[25] According to Microsoft these changes were a response to people abusing the service by using OneDrive to store PC backups, movie collections, and DVR recordings.[26]

Storage

Quota

As of July 2018 the service offers 5 GB of free storage for new users.[2][27] Additional storage is available for purchase.[28]

The amount of storage available has changed several times. Initially, the service provided 7 GB of storage and, for one year, an additional 3 GB of free storage to students.[29] Users who signed up to OneDrive prior to April 22, 2012 were able to opt-in for a limited time offer of 25 GB of free storage upgrade. The service is built using HTML5 technologies,[13] and files up to 300 MB can be uploaded via drag and drop into the web browser,[30] or up to 10 GB via the OneDrive desktop application for Microsoft Windows and OS X.[31] From September 23, 2013 onwards, in addition to 7 GB of free storage (or 25 GB for users eligible for the free upgrade), power users who required more storage could choose from one of four paid storage plans.[32]

Users in some regions may need to have a certain payment card or PayPal account to pay.[33] The paid storage plan is renewed automatically each year unless Microsoft or the user cancels the service.[34]

Upon the re-launch as OneDrive, monthly payment plans were introduced, along with the ability to earn up to 5 GB of free storage for referring new users to OneDrive (500 MB each), and 3 GB if users enable automatic uploads of photos using the OneDrive mobile apps on smartphones.[23] Subscribers to Office 365's home-oriented plans also receive additional storage for use with the service, with 20 GB per user.[35]

In June 2014 it was announced that OneDrive's default storage would increase to 15 GB, putting it in line with its competitor Google Drive. An additional 15 GB were offered for activating camera roll backup on a mobile device, putting it ahead of Google Drive until November 2015, when this bonus was cancelled. The amount of additional storage for Office 365 subscribers also increased to 1 TB.[35] Microsoft reduced the price of OneDrive storage subscriptions at that time.

In October 2014 Microsoft announced that it would offer unlimited OneDrive storage to all Office 365 subscribers.[36] However, on November 3, 2015, the 1 TB cap was reinstated. Microsoft additionally announced the planned replacement of its 100 GB and 200 GB plans with a new 50 GB plan in early 2016, and the reduction of free storage from 15 GB to 5 GB. Any current accounts over this limit could keep the increased storage for at least 12 months.[37][27][38] Following calls for Microsoft to reverse the reduction decision, Microsoft announced on December 11 of the same year that it would allow existing users to request to have up to 30GB of free storage unaffected by the reduction, and said it would fully refund customers of Office 365 not satisfied with the 1TB cap, among other redress.[39]

Versioning

OneDrive initially did not store previous versions of files, except for Microsoft Office formats.[40] In July 2017, however, Microsoft OneDrive team announced that version history support for all file types was the top requested feature; as such, OneDrive would keep older versions of all files for up to 30 days.[41]

Recycle bin

OneDrive implements a "recycle bin"; files the user chooses to delete are stored there for a time, without counting as part of the user's allocation, and can be reinstated until they are ultimately purged from OneDrive.[18]

Download as ZIP files

Entire folders can be downloaded as a single ZIP file with OneDrive. For a single download, there is a limit of 15 GB.

Editing

Office Online

Microsoft added Office Online (known at the time as Office Web Apps) capability to OneDrive in its "Wave 4" update, allowing users to upload, create, edit and share Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents directly within a web browser. In addition, Office Online allows multiple users to simultaneously co-author Excel documents in a web browser, and co-author OneNote documents with another web user or the desktop application. Users can also view the version history of Office documents stored on OneDrive.[42]

Photos and videos

OneDrive can use geo-location data for photos uploaded to the service, and will automatically display a map of the tagged location. OneDrive also allows users to tag people in photos uploaded via the web interface or via Windows Photo Gallery.

Microsoft has released OneDrive client applications for Android,[17]iOS,[51]Windows 8,[15][33]Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile,[52]Windows Phone[51]Xbox 360,[53] and Xbox One[23] that allow users to browse, view and organize files stored on their OneDrive cloud storage. In addition, Microsoft also released desktop applications for Microsoft Windows (Vista and later) and OS X (10.7 Lion and later)[54] that allow users to synchronize their entire OneDrive storage with their computers for offline access, as well as between multiple computers.[55] The OneDrive client for Windows allows users to "fetch" the contents of their PCs via the web browser, provided the user enabled this option; macOS users can fetch from a PC, but not vice versa. The Android, iOS and Windows Phone 8 versions also allow camera photos to automatically be uploaded to OneDrive.[23] Upon the re-branding as OneDrive, the Xbox One app also added achievements.[56]

In addition to the client apps, OneDrive is integrated into Windows 8.1 and later, Microsoft Office 2010 and later, as well as the Office and Photos hub in Windows Phone, enabling users to access documents, photos and videos stored on their OneDrive account. OneDrive in Windows 8.1 can sync user settings and files, through either the included OneDrive app (originally called SkyDrive, until the name was changed with a Windows update[57]) or File Explorer, deprecating the previous Windows client. Along with the use of reparse points, these changes allow files to be accessed directly from OneDrive as if they are stored locally. The OneDrive app was also updated to include a local file manager. Unlike on Windows 8, use of OneDrive on Windows 8.1 requires the user's Windows account be linked to a Microsoft account; the previous OneDrive desktop client (which did not have this requirement) no longer works on Windows 8.1. Additionally, the Fetch feature does not work on Windows 8.1.[23][55][58][59]

In an update on 4 July 2017, OneDrive desktop client started showing an error message to the effect that the local OneDrive folder must be located on an NTFS volume only. Other file systems, including the older FAT32 and exFAT, as well as the newer ReFS were not supported. Microsoft further commented that this was always the requirement; it had merely fixed a bug in which the warning was not displayed. Microsoft also denied this feature having anything to do with the forthcoming OneDrive Files On-Demand.[60][61]

Microsoft OneNote users can sync one or more of their notebooks using OneDrive. Once a notebook is selected for sharing, OneDrive copies the notebook from the user's computer to OneDrive, and that online copy then becomes the original for all future changes. The originating copy remains on the user's hard drive but is no longer updated by OneNote. Users can switch back to an offline-only version of the notebook by manually changing its location in OneNote, but unpredictable results may occur, including the OneNote application crashing and loss of notebook data under certain conditions. Under such circumstances, re-sharing the Notebook to OneDrive may result in recovery of the lost data.

Interoperability

OneDrive allows users to embed their Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents into other web pages. These embedded documents allow anyone who visits these web pages to interact with them, such as browsing an embedded PowerPoint slideshow or perform calculations within an embedded Excel spreadsheet. In addition, Microsoft has released a set of APIs for OneDrive via Live Connect to enable developers to develop web services and client apps utilizing OneDrive's cloud storage.[63] This allows users of these web services and client apps to browse, view, upload or edit files stored on OneDrive. A software development kit (SDK) is available for .NET Framework, iOS, Android and Python with a limited set of API for web apps and Windows.[64]

OneDrive is already interoperable with a host of web services, including:

Directly upload Office documents and photos within Outlook.com, store them on OneDrive and share them with other users.[65]

Directly save Office documents within Outlook.com to OneDrive, and view or edit these documents directly within the web browser.[66]

Edit Office documents within the web browser using Office Online and reply directly back to the sender with the edits made.[66][67]

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn: Enables users to quickly share their files with their contacts on these social networks.[68] OneDrive maintains an access control list of all users with permissions to view or edit the files, including those users on social networks.[69]

Windows Live Groups: Before being discontinued, Windows Live Groups provided each group with 1 GB of storage space on OneDrive to be shared between the group members. Group members were allowed to access, create, modify and delete files within the group's OneDrive folders, along with the other functionality that OneDrive provides. However, these features eventually became native to OneDrive.

Privacy concerns

Data stored on OneDrive is subject to monitoring by Microsoft, and any content that is in violation of Microsoft's Code of Conduct is subject to removal and may lead to temporary or permanent shutdown of the account. This has led to privacy concerns in relation to data stored on OneDrive.[70] Microsoft has responded by indicating that "strict internal policies [are] in place to limit access to a user’s data", and that advanced mechanisms, such as Microsoft's automated PhotoDNA scanning tool, are utilized to ensure users abide with the Code of Conduct and that their account does not contain files in contravention thereof, such as partial human nudity (including art or drawings), or any online surveys.[71][72]

OneDrive for Business

Microsoft has a similarly named but unrelated software plus service offering called OneDrive for Business (previously SkyDrive Pro[21][22]). While OneDrive is a personal storage service on the web, OneDrive for Business is a managed cloud storage for business users that replaces SharePoint Workspace. The physical medium on which the information is stored can be either hosted on-premises or purchased as service subscription from Microsoft.[73]

External links

There are multiple websites that allow users to store their files securely on the cloud so that only they or people they choose can access them. Microsoft OneDrive lets anyone upload their own files and then share them with friends, family, or other people. You can store practically anything on OneDrive as long as you have the storage capacity for the file or files. You are only allowed a small amount of storage space to begin, but you can easily expand that capacity by subscribing to one of the premium plans that Microsoft provides. Either way, you’ll love how easy OneDrive is to use, for whatever your need is.

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